Golden Axe - PC Engine CD Review 

yes indeed, they did their best with that conversion.

Agreed, rather no cutscenes with better graphics

The Genesis had very similar hardware to Sega's 16-bit arcade board, just a bit weaker in terms of CPU and memory. It was basically built to handle their current-gen arcade games, like how the Famicom/NES was designed to play Donkey Kong.

@@jasonblalock4429 The Genesis was an amazing piece of hardware when it was designed, it had one limiting factor and that was its color pallet, but that same limiting factor also helped it with speed and memory size and complex processing. The fact it can only put 61 colors on screen means that the video ram does not need to be that large and because of that, it was able to do more with less. Everything back then was a balancing act between price, performance, and features. I think the Turbo Grafx was very capable, but it took clever tricks to pull off some things that the genesis did for free. So like this example, it was just lazy programming and time to market. The Snes was not raw, like the Genesis and Turbo, it was a box of tricks that took over lots of the processing and that made games look good without much work, but when you peal back the paint, it really was not that much better than the other 16 bit systems, it was just easy to make games look and sound good... At the end of the day that is all that really mattered anyways.

Yeah Sega did a great job

That's the thing we've seen the NES/master system and various other consoles that shouldn't have been able to achieve what they did achieve the impossible. You could tell they tried to paper over or obscure the limitations and other horrible aspects with the CD soundtrack and cinematics. It should have been so much better and I'd honestly be extremely curious to find out what exactly all went wrong to get this where it is. I do feel like it was probably rushed out but I also feel like there's other things that led to how bad this is.

You aren't wrong. While I still think the graphics should still be better, the original PCE CD hardware was certainly a hurdle for the visuals. But even then, nothing excuses the gameplay. It should play better regardless of how it looks. This was just a shit show from start to finish.

Very interesting. One minor correction: SFII for the PCE was released in '92.

Given how bad the gameplay is I wouldn't be surprised if the horrible presentation is more than just a matter of limited RAM, everything is pointing at a shoddy work.

The game should have been designed to use the super cd upgrade to 256k...64k is just way to small even in the 90s for a cd base system.. Look at the Arcade card 2mb it make a few great almost arcade quality games.

That would be amazing! I wish Sega would have done something like this for Golden Axe's 30th Anniversary. Maybe even include The Revenge of Death Adder, too! It has been over a decade since the last Golden Axe game, so I hope Sega does a revival of the series at some point!

QOL? Wait, wait...Quality of Life?

Openbor GoldenAxeGenesis3.0 and Golden Axe Legend.

@@Sinn0100 Correct!

Master Linkuei has you covered! Golden Axe Returns!

Yeah, same here! It definitely looks like a Master System release graphically.

The Master System Golden Axe looks and plays better than this Golden Ass by a mile!

@@RolandoMarreroPR That is for certain!

The anime-style arrangement is horribly inappropriate for Golden Axe. This music would sound fine in a Valis game

Mind boggling

But they should take inspiration from revenge of death adder.

I said this exact thing in another thread last year.

I couldn't agree more, DOTEMU could do justice to this series no question.

thats a great idea !

Play guardian heroes and you'll have a different opinion entirely.

Yep, the TG-16 may not have done great in the US and elsewhere but the PC Engine is and was incredible. I'm so glad it's been re-evaluated and given new life and that people can use their old TG-16 with a little bit of tinkering.

Thank you!

Good choice.

@@SegaLordX thsnk you Sega Lord X, will you look at all the SEGA games on the P.C. Engine and CD sistem?

Even the game gear can do better than this.

Lack of ram in the CD addon seems to the be the real issue, limiting animation, sprite size and detail, but the limited number of enemies is a limitation of the PC-Engine’s display hardware.

It's true more bits doesn't always mean faster and more powerful, but the Mega Drive had indeed a more powerful processor. The team that ported Marble Madness to it considered the PC Engine first, but dropped it and went with Mega Drive because 8-bit wasn't enough to calculate the ball physics. I think the problem here is that the PC Engine can't stream new graphical assets mid-level, which is why there are so few tiles. It also cannot flip tiles on the X or Y axis like the Mega Drive can, so it needs to waste more RAM on mirrored assets. Other than that, the Mega Drive also has higher horizontal resolution, 320 vs. 256 pixels and four more sound channels. PC Engine could have used its major strength, more colors on screen, but didn't.

@@KaskelotenZebbe You're correct when you say that the PC-Engine can't mirror flip its background tiles (its sprite tile functionality certainly can), but the fact of the matter is computationally the 6820 is faster than the MD's 68k. There's several benchmarks available on RU-vid that demonstrate this; granted they cover simple instructions like ADC (add plus carry) and nothing terribly complex but even the simplest form of benchmark is a more solid comparison than the anecdote of a development team deciding for one platform against another. If the modest 1.79MHz Famicom 6502 can handle Marble Madness' physics, then there is no question about the 6820's ability to do the same. You're also incorrect also when you say the Mega Drive has a higher HRES. In fact, out of the three major 16-bit consoles, the PC-Engine is the most versatile when it comes to screen resolution, and they've been using this versatility since the system's inception. R-Type I + II both run at 352H. Sherlock Holmes for the PCE-CD uses the system's 512H mode. The Arcade CD Art of Fighting port uses the PC Engine's unique ability to increment and decrement HRES and VRES on-the-fly to simulate the zooming in-and-out of the original Neo Geo game. Chris Covell has also demonstrated that the machine can also deliver 448i when it comes to the VRES. Granted, the Megadrive's 320H mode enjoys an extended number of sprites per scanline over its 256H mode which the PC-Engine can't duplicate.

@@CplEthane Well, a simple benchmark doesn't really decide overall CPU performance. 16-bit instructions are much more efficient at multi-tasking, which is necessary if you want to have lots of animation, sprites and background layers. But the problem in Golden Axe's case is probably the RAM, which may be linked to the reason why they made those upgrade cards (and, maybe made Sega decide to have lots of RAM on the Sega CD, which even then wasn't enough for 2 player on Golden Axe). Correct, PC Engine has those hi-res modes, but they weren't the standard, were they? Sure, Marble Madness is on NES too, but it just doesn't play as good tbh. I love both my Mega Drive and PC Engine, but for different reasons. PC Engine has the colour, the CD as a standard format, some cool exclusive games. Mega Drive has a higher horizontal res standard, more sound channels, 2 bg layers, better CPU and its exclusive games.

@@KaskelotenZebbe You're right, a simple benchmark doesn't really decide overall CPU performance but again, it's still better than anecdotal testimony. It would take a great deal of time and effort to exhaustively compare the performance of a 6820 vs a comparably clocked 68k, but keep in mind that most software for both systems relied on the add + compare instructions most of the time. I believe you're thinking of _pipelining_, not multitasking. Multitasking is (for sub 32-bit hardware, anyway) strictly a software endeavor. And 16-bit CPUs aren't any more special at pipelining than 8-bit CPUs are. The 6820 doesn't suffer as many clock cycles per instruction as the 68k for that matter either. You can't say that the 68k is a "better" CPU than the 6820 because it doesn't offer any real advantages over the 6820 when it comes to tile-based software titles. As someone who has developed for the PC-Engine, I can tell you from experience that the problem with Golden Axe is _not_ with the CD system RAM. PC-Engine CD Golden Axe uses the comparably measly 64k System 1.0/2.0 card, which amounts to half of a megabit. The original Mega Drive port is only 4 megabits (half a megabyte), and this _includes_ the entire bonus final level after you defeat the original Death=Adder. I'm pretty sure that even with 64k, the PC-Engine would have little to no issues loading an entire level, all the player/enemy sprites, and sound FX provided all these assets were simply ported over from the Mega Drive version untouched. There's a *lot* of PC-Engine game assets and code that you can pack into 64k. The Mega-CD had 6 megabits of RAM which means the entirety of the original 4 megabit Mega Drive Golden Axe port (with two-player capability) could have easily fit into a single load. I couldn't tell you how they managed to botch the Mega-CD port of that game. Officially produced games used horizontal resolutions from 256 to 320 to 352 to 512 (it could drop as low as 160H but no game ever used this mode.) And if officially-produced games used these resolutions, then they were standard, simple as that. The PC-Engine could also smoothly increment between these resolutions on-the-fly while the game is running with no hit to performance (see: Art of Fighting.) The Mega Drive is incapable of anything besides 256 and 320.

​@@CplEthane I would say they are both good CPUs/systems that are good at different things. You can see it in the different libraries, PC Engine does graphical adventures and shmups better while Mega Drive does run and guns and other action-heavy action titles with lots of sprites and animation better. You just don't see stuff like Alien Soldier, Gunstar Heroes or Contra Hard Corps on PC Engine, the Mega Drive can do multi-jointed sprites very well and doesn't need the 64x32 sprite option. Sega actually originally planned to go with an 8-bit CPU for Mega Drive, but changed to 68k despite making it more expensive and selling the system at a loss. I don't think they would have done that if the CPU was worse. So you'd say the Golden Axe port is just bad because they couldn't code it properly? They even went an extra mile in redrawing most assets to compensate for that if so. I don't know either why the Mega-CD port is missing the 2 player option. Maybe the new sound and bad optimization prevented them from it. Another example is PlayStation has more RAM than the entire Final Fantasy VI, yet again it requires 10 seconds of loading every time you want to open the menu. Well, yeah, but I think there are more 320H games on Mega Drive than there are games with that or higher resolution on PC Engine. I wouldn't say either is better at all times, it depends on the genre. The Mega Drive has 16-bit CPU, 4 more sound channels, uses hi-res more often. PC Engine more resolution options, efficient 8-bit CPU etc.

I didn't know what to expect when he said it was going to be bad and wow it's literally worse than I could have imagined. The sound effects and graphics are the worst I've personally seen on the PC engine itself not even CD. This just is an amazing letdown cutscenes and music notwithstanding.

More like hidden turd. The FMVs don't make up for the flaws.

@@Invidente7 I’m talking about RU-vid as the tube. And I’m referring to Sega Lord’s channel when I call it a gem. This game is ten types of trash, all only edible for raccoons with early signs of rabies.

It's remarkably bad. It almost does seem like they tried to make it as bad as possible and the worst version they possibly could. If it wasn't for the music and cinematics it would have nothing redeemable at all.

Extreme lazy development

The Genesis version is a very close second to the arcade. It's not perfect but but you could tell Sega did a lot of magic on it.

🙀

Glad you enjoyed it.

@@SegaLordX Hey man, you jumped from the atari 2600 to the nes with some odyssey 2 in between. I think you mentioned this anyway. I had a friend with an atari, he got the odyssey 2 later then I had another buddy with a colecovision before the nes and master system were around. You never .mention the colecovision ever. Wondering your impressions of it and any experience playing it youmay have. Thanks for everything btw

Thought same, like maybe they just ported the wrong port lol.

SMS Golden Axe looks much better, at least in still images

@@gc3k true! I was tricked by those still images more times than I want to admit!

Honestly this needs a wha happun?!

Honestly I just think it was inexperienced hands dealing with the game. Telenet are a fine company but they never really made anything amazingly groundbreaking and most of their games (original or ports) were at best just average. They were also working on presumably several games at once at the time and this one probably fell in the hands of the B Team

@@officialFredDurstfanclub Yeah that's what I'm thinking. Developers weren't the hugely-staffed corporations they are today, and even the best ones like Konami would sometimes have a B Team execute a game with poor results (the Mega Drive version of Sunset Riders comes to mind). Telenet being nowhere near the level of Konami only meant their B Team was probably that much worse.

for sure. For me, it's one of those rare games where I want to master it. It's great when you can finally 1cc this game.

That's a super under rated game 🎮.

I will break something if Dotemu makes Golden Axe look like Streets of Rage 4. Especially considering how amazing Dragon's Crown looks

@@gc3k SOR4 looks great.

@@kalofkrypton SoR4 looks like Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap

And add the 2 player co-op from the cart version.

Not a fan of the music, it's not Golden Axe at all

There's an MD+ hack that at least replaces the original Genesis music with the PCE versions.

Yes I have. I'm not a fan of that either.

@@SegaLordX Yeahhhh! I got an answer! \o/ The only thing I liked about the Master System version, was the title screen, with that "Conan" guy with the axe... I'm a fan of the "Conan The Barbarian" comic books! :)